Rattle wrote:

In an interview broadcast on Friday, Case, who was shoved aside as chairman in 2003 and who left the board entirely in 2005, said, "Yes, I'm sorry I did it," referring to the 2001 merger of Time Warner Inc (Charts). and AOL.

Another episode of Charlie Rose I need to watch..

I can't think of anyone I was conversing with at the time who though the AOL/TW merger was a good idea, myself included.

Case and Turner should go horseback riding together.

Actually it made perfect sense and still does. AOL at it's heart was a content company. It was the same business as TW, selling adverts inside of content vehicles. The gem of AOL was that they had new and more capable channels than TW had organically. Had TW embraced AOL instead of feeling threatened by it, it would be a very different world. Instead of advertisers and content companies feeling threatened by things like Tivo, Google, and Napster - they would've embraced those channels and exploited their additional capabilities - like one-to-one marketing and personalized segmentation.

Instead what you got was TW business leaders, wounded because their stock wasn't valued as highly as AOL's, getting bitchy because AOL didn't have strong revenue streams yet. I emphasize 'yet', because as we all know, old media is fading away pretty quickly now. When was the last time you read a newspaper? Or better yet, when was the last time you looked at an ad or classified in the newspaper? Those revenue streams are irrevocably changed and AOL's model was the correct one. It's just that the management at TW wasn't ready to concede that.

To make matters worse, AOL still had a large faction that thought it was a technology company. When you have software development, large Internet infrastructure, and media development listed as a 'core competency' when you're really a content company, it's easy to see how the TW people were successful at proving that AOL didn't know what the hell they were doing. Those lines of business, if they even generated revenue at all, should've been discarded before the merger. Some of them were, but not all of them. I think that would've provided clarity in the ranks and made AOL more nimble.

RE: AOL founder says he is 'sorry' for Time Warner merger - Jul. 24, 2006